It is generally known that the United States, a large country, has spawned business corporations that transcend international boundaries--"multinationals." What is not generally known is that many smaller countries are rapidly following suit--they too are opening and expanding international operations for their own local firms. This book is the first organized effort by scholars to deal with non-American international corporations as a general phenomenon.Initially presented at a colloquium devoted to the subject held at MIT in January 1976, these seven essays bring to light the relatively...

Charles P. Kindleberger is widely regarded as among the most accessible and intelligent practitioners of the economist's craft. This collection of his papers and lectures, articles and reviews, prepared over the past decade, focuses on the role of multinational corporations in the international economy, their relationships with home and host countries (both developed and less developed), the determinants of their size, the impetus to their investment behavior, their history, the literature about them, and their regulation.Chapters relate the phenomenon of the multinational corporation to...